Once again, Mr. Stevens has gotten my thought processes working with a comment to one of my posts. You can obviously read his comment in it's entirety there, but what I jumped off of was his attempt to summarize my view on crime coverage involving famous people: "If I'm summarizing it correctly, you're saying we're more interested when the famous person is a perpetrator of the crime, rather than a victim." That's a pretty fair summary, but I wanted to expand on the point a little more, and didn't want to bury it in a comment.
For background, this line of discussion all started back with my posts about the media reaction to the murder of Sean Taylor. You can see those posts here, and here. In the 2nd post on the topic, I stated that my perception was that one (or more) of the following 3 things were true of any crime story that captured national attention for an extended period of time: #1. The perpetrator of the crime is famous/noteworthy, #2. The crime committed was particularly heinous/out of the ordinary, and #3. The victim is particularly sympathetic or innocent. Note that, as I laid these out, the fame of the perpetrator is contained within the list, but the fame of the victim is not. At the time, I stated that while Taylor was famous, various assumptions led to him being viewed as less than innocent, and thus there was a more muted media and public reaction to his murder.
I was contrasting the coverage of Taylor's death to the coverage of the Michael Vick case, which has once again jumped up this week to dominate the headlines. This story clearly has a ridiculous amount of staying power, as it has received as much or more run on the talk radio programs I listen to over the last 2 days than Taylor's death did, despite now being several months old. As I highlighted in yesterday's post, the events of yesterday didn't really add much new to the story, and yet it had all the buzz back on it again.
Now, it's not totally fair to compare the Vick case to the Taylor case in making a point about us being more fascinated with crimes that celebrities commit than we are with cases where celebrities are the victim of crimes. Vick is a much bigger star than Taylor, and there has been a racial/cultural undertone to his case that has kept things more lively than they might have been otherwise. There are far too many variables to be able to isolate Vick's status as the perpetrator vs. Taylor's as the victim as the primary reason for the difference in coverage. And I don't believe it is the primary one.
Relatively recent history does offer us a case involving an alleged celebrity criminal that is much more comparable to Taylor's celebrity victim case, however. We only need go back to late January 2000, when Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis was implicated for murder. That story made and continued to hold a dominant place in national headlines with developments up to the point of the trial in June, and Lewis' eventual plea bargain. I would wager large amounts of cash that the legal proceedings surrounding Taylor's alleged killers will never sustain the kind of national interest that the Lewis case did. We've probably already seen the last time that the Taylor case grabs top billing from the national media.
So yes, I do believe that we are much more interested when famous people commit crimes than we are when they are the victim of crimes. And to be honest, it seems fairly clear to me why that would be the case. In a criminal case involving a celebrity, the celebrity is the person that the media and the general public is going to care about the most. In a case of a celebrity victim, there comes a time pretty early in the case where the story ceases to be primarily about the celebrity. This is especially true in the case of a celebrity murder. In the Sean Taylor case, the person the media and general public is interested in is now dead, and completely out of the story. While I'm sure we all want to see Taylor's killer(s) brought to justice, the simple reality is that we're not that interested in the fate of the unknown suspects that the case now centers on. Even when celebrities are victims of something short of murder, and do stay involved in the case to some degree, their fate is not the one in question. On the contrary, in the Lewis case, or any case with a celebrity criminal (or alleged criminal), the person of media/public interest stays at the center of the story throughout, and it is their fate that is being decided via the legal proceedings. That distinguishing fact keeps the case more compelling to a national audiance.
So, while you could probably make an argument that a crime involving a celebrity would have the same initial interest regardless of whether the celebrity was the accused or the victim, it seems clear to me that a story involving an accused celebrity will, as a rule, have more staying power throughout the life of the case than will one involving a celebrity victim.
9 months ago
2 comments:
I'm glad to see you bring up the Ray Lewis case. Immediately after Lewis plea bargained, I was asked by an acquaintance if I thought Lewis had gotten away with murder. Of course, for those of us who actually followed the case, we knew that Lewis had never even been accused of murder, just charged with it. (He was, in fact, unquestionably guilty of obstruction of justice, which is what he pled to and he might have been guilty of being an accessory after the fact.) While Georgia law has a weird provision which allows people to be charged with murders they didn't commit or even intend to commit, Lewis's trial was an obvious overreach by the prosecutor. But it had the expected effect. Lewis, like Richard Jewell, will always have a large percentage of the public believing he committed a crime he almost certainly did not, in fact, commit.
Lewis was, however, guilty of a number of misjudgments. While most of the evidence seems to indicate that he attempted to act as peacemaker in the dispute, Lewis could have chosen his friends more wisely and refused to lie on their behalf. Interestingly, both of his friends were acquitted of murder so Lewis, probably the most innocent person involved in the fight, was the only one to be convicted of anything with regard to it. Such is the price of wealth and fame. (I don't believe for a second that the prosecutor would have stretched to charge a less famous defendant with murder like he did Lewis.)
By the by, one question I have for you. You seem to be blaming the media for its attention on various things. But is it really the media who are to blame? Or is it the public? Are the media misserving the public or is it just going where the public's interest is?
As it relates specifically to this post, I'm really laying no blame. I think the media focuses on celebrity criminal stories moreso than celebrity victim stories because that's where the public interest is, for reasons I outlined.
Going back to what started all of this, the dramatic amount of coverage that Vick got relative to Taylor's death, that's where I hit the media, because I think the vast majority of it rushed to judgment on the circumstances surrounding Taylor's death, and made him out to be less of a victim than he was, which cooled their response and the response of the public to the story. That's doing everyone a disservice. I expect the public to look at Taylor's history and jump to conclusions, but I hold the media to a higher standard of responsibility, that I just didn't see exercised for the most part.
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